Privacy Policy Politics
By Aaron Wood
Google is consolidating the sixty-odd privacy policies spread across its services to amalgamate user information. This means that the videos you watch on Youtube, search queries you make and emails you send can be combined to give advertisers a better idea of your interests. Google claims that the move will make its search capabilities more intuitive, but privacy watchdogs disagree.
Not only is Google creating an overarching privacy policy, it is also altering its terms of use to enable the sharing of user data over all the Google applications linked to a user’’s account. Google claims that its new single privacy policy is in keeping with other large Internet-based companies. Having missed its revenue and earnings targets in the last quarter, critics believe that new policies will help Google to garner information to hone advertising and improve sales.
Executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, Jeffrey Chester voiced his dissent; “Google finally stopped pretending it’’s concerned about protecting privacy. Winning its battle against Facebook to remain king of the Web requires it to escalate the digital arms race.” Chester claims that Google’’s move is more about improved advertising revenue than it is about improved service to users. “To stoke ad revenues, Google must pull together its vast storehouse of user information, combining all the data it holds on every single user. Its DoubleClick Ad exchange depends on profiting from the sales of richer profiles.”
Google points out that users can ditch the advertising at any time by installing the advertising opt-out cookie on their browsers. This has done little to appease detractors who want users to have the option to stop Google from gathering information on them if they so choose.
Google’’s loss of advertising influence is attributed to Facebook’’s more aggressive advertising targeting. Facebook shares user data across its applications with wild abandon and has the kind of overarching privacy policy Google is moving towards. This allows Facebook to utilize user data to tailor advertising and improve sales. Although Facebook privacy issues have made headlines on several occasions, it doesn”t seem to be slowing them down. A trend Google hopes their users will follow too.
Google has been pushing back of late, releasing a letter to the eight House members who expressed concern over user privacy. The letter claims user’’s privacy is not being jeopardized and that users can curb information gathering by turning off their search history, or by utilizing different Google accounts at different times. Director of Google Public Policy, Pablo Chavez said in a letter to lawmakers; “Individuals don”t need to sign in to use many of our services including Search, Maps, and YouTube. If a user is signed in, she can still edit or turn off her search history, switch Gmail chat to off the record, control the way Google tailors ads to her interests using our Ads Preferences Manager, use Incognito mode on Chrome, or use any of the other privacy tools we offer.”
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